The present invention relates generally to emergency lighting fixtures and particularly relates to combinations of illuminated exit signs and the like with emergency lighting units to form fixtures having multiple emergency lighting functions in a single device.
Emergency lighting is necessary to guide people to safety in the event of an emergency situation such as a fire or a shutdown of a normal power. The most common type of emergency lighting is the exit sign which is also the most noticed not only due to its ubiquity but also due to the fact that most exit signs are constantly illuminated and are therefore readily seen. Exit signs are typically placed above doorways or in egress paths to indicate the most efficient manner of exiting a building when emergency occurs.
FIG. 1 shows a construction of a general emergency lighting fixture in a dissembled view. As shown in FIG. 1, the conventional emergency lighting fixture is formed of a metal frame 1, an indicator 2 installed on the front of the metal frame 1, and an illumination lamp 3 installed in the inside of the frame 1.
The indicator 2 is made of transparent or translucent plastic material in order to display the letter clearly when the illumination lamp 3 is turned on. The letter xe2x80x9cEXITxe2x80x9d marked on the front surface of the indicator 2 is usually made with a written form or an engraved style. It is general to use a fluorescent light as the illumination lamp 3. An emergency power supplying battery 4 is provided to maintain a power supply condition for the indicator 2 even when a main power is lost, securing a normally on-state of the indicator 2 nevertheless of an existence of the main power. The fire sensor 6 detects the fire and transmits an electric signal in order to shut off the main power. A housing 5 covers the front portion of the frame 1.
However, since it is hard for the fluorescent light of the conventional emergency lighting fixture to provide an efficient facility of straightness (the feature characterized by how far the light proceeds along an unilateral direction without dispersion), the light from the fluorescent lamp is scattered before proceeding with a required distance through a dense smoke. Substantially, the fluorescent light faintly brightens around the exit, but cannot make people being far away from an exit identify an exact location of the exit. As a result, such insufficient indication performance of the fluorescent lamp may not be helpful to save life damage in the event of fire accompanying a lot of smoke or dust.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an emergency lighting fixture for minimizing life damages by identifying effectively a location of the exit under the thick smoke or dust in the building when an emergency such as a fire or an earthquake occurs.
In order to attain the above object, according to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided an emergency lighting fixture including: a frame employing an indicator on the front of the frame; an illumination lamp installed in the inside of the frame; a laser projector exposed to the front of the frame from the inside of the frame; and an emergency power supplying battery, installed in the inside of the frame, for impressing a power supply into the illuminating lamp and the laser projector in response to a signal of a fire sensor in the event of fire.
According to an emergency lighting fixture of the present invention, in the event of fire, the laser projector is activated by a power supply from the batter in response to a signal from the fire sensor, so that laser beams from the laser projector let sheltering people identify a location of an exit door easily and rapidly.
The present invention will be better understood from the following detailed description of the exemplary embodiment thereof taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, and its scope will be pointed out in the appended claims.